I feel pretty good with what we accomplished in two weekends and $20 budget, shot right here in Austin, Texas... The first videocast motorshow dealing strictly with scooters and mopeds. This is the first of what we hope will be a monthly show for TheScooterScoop.com and now that this one is under our belt, it will only get better.

Fireworks on the river last night, huge crowds, then scootering through the dark streets after midnight, with sparks flying towards you from burning incense and the New Year's luck people were shepherding home from the crowded pagodas.

And, of course, we should probably also mention li xi (lucky money), huge bonuses for staff, Ong Tao the kitchen god, why you don't want a single pregnant woman showing up at the house today, and more...

°°

We, along with everything else in Vietnam, will be closed until the 6th for Tet (New Years). You can still order online but only UK stock will be shipped.

I know some Vietnamese scooter dealers get bad press, but I have to praise ScootRS. I have bought many things from them and everything I received has arrived quickly and been of good quality. Disc brakes, carbs and general bits and pieces. Today I received one of their race seats, which I believe is one of the best looking seats around, just five days after I ordered it and it came with a free calender.

What a great year it has been for us! We made some tremendous progress in the big quality drive we began last year. We improved our staff 10-fold by hiring some great new skilled people and weeding out any poor performers, expanded our inhouse machinery and capabilities a lot, improved our scooters even more with better procedures and parts, redesigned and improved numerous old parts and received many happy emails about them, brought out some great new parts along the way, bumped up our instock levels to speed delivery, put in place some good systems to help us stay on track and, guess what? We aren't done yet!

For example, currently we're carefully testing our new Vespa disc brake and tubeless rims before releasing them and they are both looking very good. And those are only two of the new items we're working on.

It was worth the wait! Our 2006 Classic Scooter Calendar is back from the printer and ready to go. We're quite pleased with it - we better be, yours truly designed it after numerous bad drafts came back - and we think you will be too.

This year's calendar is very special. We hired two of the top models in all of Vietnam and shot in four locations alongside four of the nicest Vespa and Lambretta scooters we restored at scootRS all year. It was quite a production but we got some great shots! The printing is on very high quality poster size glossy paper, 7 pages in all. This is one of the nicest classic scooter calendars we've ever seen!

The best news is: anyone ordering over $100 in parts will get a free calendar!

We mentioned before that we set out months back on a quality drive to improve our service, our staff, and, of course, many items we sell, redoing many completely and adding new items. It's nice to get emails responding to it.

Just a quick email about the disc brake I recently purchased from you. I am very impressed with the quality of both the hub and switch housing, with both items fitting perfectly. Furthermore, it arrived 2 days after it was posted and was packaged to a very high standard.

This was only my second purchase from scootRS (the first being some stainless front dampers which were also top quality), but will not be my last.

Impressive products at impressive prices.

Great!

Did we mention yet that we have a Vespa disc brake kit coming out of similar quality? Won't be too long now so if you've always wanted a quality disc brake kit on your Vespa but were put off by the prices out there, help is on the way!

Just a quick photo of the latest batch of our new Lambretta front shocks, or dampers if you will. As we mentioned earlier, these are much better than others you see around, or ones we sold before: much stronger and neater. All done inhouse, only at ScootRS.

If you haven't done so yet, check out this Ferrari red electric-start GP200 scooter we just finished. (Amazing how it sounds faster when you say “Ferrari red”, huh?) We've redesigned the electric starter to improve it in a few ways and it is pretty darn slick, just like a modern scooter. Hmmm, maybe time for a ScootRS M-class Lambretta???

By the way, UK orders will not be shipped out until the new year. In Asia we good pagans will continue to work, so order away.

As you can see, we've been tinkering a little. You can now do different types of searches at the top of the page so as to get results only for your preferred type of scooter, Lambretta or Vespa, if you want that. Also search by name only or full text.